Authorisation

Once I stated the title I immediately realized that there are many distinct dimensions having their own «bottoms» and «ups». So I must specify. The «bottom» is a set of elementary data manipulation operations available to you as a programmer or a data security specialist (although it is often the same «you»). The «top» is a transitive closure of this set. The set of operations available for a user is rather close to the «top», and mapping them into the basic data handling operations constitutes the essence of the programmer's job. The «bottom-up» approach to data security is a job of defining all the necessary data access rules in terms of the basic data handling operations — you apply certain restrictions to various data elements and they affect the data system overall behavior, namely data accessibility in the high-level terms used by the end users. The most elaborated text-book example of this approach is SQL — it gives you very low-level security bricks to build a custom building without specifying explicitly this building emergent properties.
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The «binary data» is a myth, created by very unintelligent people. This is just another undefined term in IT amongst millions of its brethren. Oh, dear! if you disagree I challenge you to define it or at least look up a definition. Seriously, give it a try.
I have challenged many advocates of «binary data» to define their beloved product of words. All of them (who are not indoctrinated enough to refuse the challenge altogether) immediately slipped into reasoning about text editors, terminals, and ASCII. But, wait, «my terminal can not display binary data» — is your terminal's problem and nothing more. Some terminals can not display unicode — is it «binary»? All different kinds of terminals unable to display different kinds of data. The same goes to the text editors — which particular byte sequences make a text editor cringe and glitch is specifically defined within the text editor and nowhere else.
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